Thursday, 16 September 2010

One of the greatest benefits of web 2.0 tools for English language learners and teachers is the possibility of recording audio and voice to share online. These tools lend themselves for a myriad of tasks you can set up for different levels and purposes.

This is my personal choice of the audio recording tools available. It is only a showcase of the available tools. Links to ideas on how to use the tools are provided in some cases.

Voki is a creative voice recording tool to create speaking avatars. It offers multiple customization options. Registration is needed and you get an embeddable widget in various sizes and colours. With Voki you also have a text to speech option. You can see a Voki in action at the top left column of this blog.

You can read about how Shelly Terrell and Ozge Karaoglu used Voki with their students here and here

20 comments:

I have tested most of these and they have varying factors to offer. However,once you get past the experimentation stage and want to include voice as a serious part of online courses, check out wimba's voice tools. Professional, flexible tools for teaching.

Well timed post as was looking for voice tools for a workshop, have tried the first four but now got 4 more to try thanks Vicky. I'd probably add fotobabble as well given you can record your descriptions of photos.

There are actually quite a few great tools for audio recording out there specifically made for language teaching, letting the teacher set a piece of speaking work for students and collect it in when they've recorded it.

I'd like to mention Schoolshape Language Lab (which we make - http://languagelabblog.com/), but in the interest of fairness I should also point out Lingt, who made a very nice online recording tool back in 2008. As I remember, there are also a couple of audio recording plugins for Moodle.

This is really a cool post. Thanks for the info, I have been using Audacity to record and dub video and audio translation project. The best part is that it's very easy to use, takes no time to learn! If you are doing translation and involve audio, you ought to try it.

I am about to try SoundCloud as an alternative to AudioBoo. The main difference being that SoundCloud's player allows comments at particular points within the timeline of recordings. This takes precision feedback to a whole new level.

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